Morgan went to a swimming party yesterday. As it was a private party I thought I’d give my underwater camera a try out and get some shots of him playing in the water.
It seemed to work quite well, even the video quality was OK. Shame about my videography skills, but I was only messing around.
Morgan seemed to have a good time though.
I’ve been paranoid about running out of battery charge in my SLR camera for a while now. Carrying an extra battery would be easy, but I liked the look of the battery grips that allows you to put two batteries in them. Not only do they allow you to add an extra battery, but they improve the grip of your camera, especially for portrait (vertical) shooting. Also, it makes your camera look bigger and more expensive!
Camera with battery grip
The ‘proper’ Canon battery grip for my camera is usually over £100. Quite a lot of money, especially seeing as I wanted a remote release as well so that I could do some night photography with long exposures using the bulb setting. I couldn’t afford both, but after looking around for a while I found one on eBay made by another manufacturer (Ownuser) that was a battery grip and an infra-red remote control with bulb setting, and only £62 as well.
With a little trepidation I ordered it and it arrived yesterday. I haven’t used it in earnest yet, but I have played around with it. It all seems pretty good to me. It attached to my camera easily and fits snugly so there isn’t any movement between the camera itself and the battery grip. It has two shutter release buttons for use with the camera in a vertical orientation. These allow for both right and left handed use and mean you can hold the camera more comfortably (and with less shake) when shooting with the camera on its side. It also has a few switches / buttons on the back that allow you to adjust Exposure compensation, AE Lock, AF Selection point and the Aperture / Shutter speed whilst holding the camera in this orientation. These buttons are a little ‘plasticy’ in feel but I doubt I’ll use them much anyway and at this price you have to expect there to be some short-cuts taken.
As well as the grip itself, the pack came with an external AA battery pack that you can attach to the battery grip via a DC adaptor, allowing you to run the camera from AA batteries. Again, I hope not to use this but I guess it could get you out of a fix if you run out of battery power on a trip and have no way of charging your Lithium Ion batteries.
In addition it comes with a little remote control that controls the camera via infra-red from two infra-red sensors on the battery grip. The remote control allow you to focus, shoot, set the self timer and also control a shot on bulb setting. Perfect for long exposures where you ant to release the shutter without touching the camera in order to minimise camera shake.
The grip has attachment points for a strap and a trip mounting. The only thing that is a little clunky is the little clip that operates the door to the battery compartment. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it could be a little smoother and easier to use.
Overall, it seems pretty good. It works, it has more features than the Canon grip and is almost half the price. It’ll take me a while to get used to handling it, but I’ll report back once I’ve used it a little more.
Our busy weekend continued with a day on the beach (after re-visiting the moth traps set the night before).
Morgan and I had a play in the sea, which gave me a chance to get my waterproof camera properly wet. It coped well and considering its size and durability I’m still pretty impressed with the photos that it takes. I used it to take all of the photos on the beach on Saturday as it is the ideal camera for such locations. I certainly wouldn’t want to be swapping lenses and playing around with my SLR whilst soaking wet and covered in sand. Somehow I don’t think it would like it.
Here I come!
Getting deeper
Glug Glug!
As well as playing in the water we did some ‘beach art’ too. Some of it was for Morgan’s homework, and then we started messing around balancing pebbles and such like.
Beach Art
Pebble Art
Pebble Stack
I also wanted to get some silhouetted shots of Morgan playing on the beach and quite like this one. In fact I might get it printed onto a large canvas so that we can hang it on the wall in the living room.
Playing on the beach
Stand off!
Horses at Ynyslas
Beach Scene
Rider 50
As part of my ‘getting back into photography’ effort I’ve been meaning to photograph a mountain biking event for a while now. I quite like the idea of having a particular ‘assignment’ rather than just wandering around on a photo-walk and hopefully all of the participants in such an event will want to see photos of themselves.
However, I’m normally taking part in such events so don’t have time to photograph them, but as I’ve been side-lined for a while I thought this would be the ideal opportunity to give it a go. I used to do lots of photography back in the days of film, but have only recently got back into it with the purchase of a digital SLR. I haven’t gone mad and don’t have loads of expensive kit, so the plan was to attend the Snowdonia Enduro in North Wales armed with my camera kit, find a few suitable spots and sit there and try to capture photos of as many of the participants as possible. I was planning on maybe even selling some of them if they were good enough, but more on that later.
For those gear-heads amongst you I was using my Canon EOS450D along with two lenses, a 70-300mm and an 18-55mm. Probably not the perfect combination but its all I’ve got so it will have to do. I’ve also just bought a new tripod which I hoped would help me hold the longer lens steady (afterall this is North Wales so I wasn’t expecting great light levels!), and as I was expecting to be sat / standing in one spot for a while trying to capture as many participants as possible I thought that setting things up on a tripod would be a great help.
Rider 124
I got there early and checked out the lay of the land then walked up the first climb of the course and set myself up to capture people coming up the first climb. This was OK, I had the sun behind me and just catching the riders faces (when it was out), but I should probably have gone a bit further up the hill so that the riders were strung out a little more. I only used the longer lens as I wanted to get nice shots of the riders themselves. Next stop was the top of the muddy, slimy descent where I took quite a few shots from a nice vantage point where the riders were framed beautifully by heather in the foreground and the trees in the background.. Making sure I was in a position where people weren’t going too fast was important here.
I then settled down in a few places at the bottom of hill and took yet more shots, by now mainly of the people doing the longer 48km option. I was trying to get some of them cornering to make them look a little more dynamic, but had problems with the background in these as there were often marshalls wandering around at these location and their bright yellow jackets in the background were distracting so I didn’t stay there long.
The tripod was indeed a good help and I was able to start messing around with a few settings to get the results I wanted. Focusing on the moving riders and capturing a nice sharp image was the main problem, and of course getting people faces exposed properly as they are often obscured by the helmets.
It all went well and I had a good day wandering around the hills playing with my camera. I would rather have been riding of course, but being behind the camera wasn’t a bad place to be and I saw a few familiar faces as they cycled past.
Back at home and I processed the photos and was fairly pleased with the results so I’ve watermarked them, resized them and uploaded them here to create a Snowdonia Enduro Photo Album. Overall it was a good day out and fairly successful. I learnt a few things and will probably give it a go at another event soon. Practice makes perfect as my grandad would have said! We’ll see what the competitors think of the photos first.
I haven’t had it long so this isn’t a full review, but my new digital camera arrived the other day so here are my first impressions.
After some deliberation over which waterproof digital camera to get I chose a Pentax Optio W60 as a second, go anywhere camera to compliment my Canon EOS 450D SLR camera. It looks nice, its just the right size to slip into your pocket, but isn’t so small that it is difficult to handle and the buttons become too fiddly. It doesn’t look waterproof which is nice, the styling is just like that of any other compact digital camera, and although I haven’t tested its waterproof capabilities yet, it is supposed to be fully waterproof. I shall be out snorkelling with it if its nice at the weekend.
The LCD on the back is large and bright and easy to view, even in bright sunlight and the operation is simple. As a man I played around with it before reading the manual and managed to work out all of the options and settings without having to revert to the manual once. I did subsequently read the manual and find a few little features that I had overlooked, but nothing major.
Photo quality is good too. It does suffer from a fair bit of noise at high ISO, but so do most cameras and it tends to up the ISO quite quickly in low light when in automatic modes, but this could be over-ridden if needed. I shall have to investigate the best modes to use for keeping the sensitivity low and adjusting the shutter speed / aperture first. Talking of modes, it has loads of them! All the normal presets modes such as full auto, program, portrait, sports, night are available and a host of others such as underwater, pets (you even have to tell it the colour of your pet!), food and text! It also has a built in panoramic mode that allows you to take three photos and the it stitches them together for you within the camera. I’ve tried this out and it seems to work pretty well and saves time in Photoshop later.
Panoramic photo stitched in camera
It also has face recognition, smile capture and blink detection. All of which are very clever, although once again I only played with these and haven’t used them in earnest yet. Other things to play with will be the high speed continuous shooting and the time lapse photography feature. It does of course record video as well.
So far so good, I don’t have anything bad to say about it. As a 2nd camera to compliment my SLR then it is ideal. Small, rugged and versatile, just what you need from a camera that can go everywhere with you and with a little bit of experimentation it will produce high quality images as well.
Finding the perfect camera can be a nightmare, but I’ve now come to the conclusion that there isn’t one camera that suits all circumstances. Which, of course, means that it is time to buy another camera! Well, you can’t have too many gadgets can you!
I know it wasn’t that long ago that I bought a new digital SLR (Canon EOS 450D). I haven’t used it as much as I would like, but it is just right for me when I feel like going on a photo walk or being a little artistic. However, it isn’t really practical for most of the things I do. I certainly wouldn’t want to take it mountain-biking with me as it is just to big to carry, and taking it to the beach or out on the water is just asking for trouble. So what I really need is a nice small, rugged and preferably waterproof compact AS WELL as the larger SLR.
In fact if you read my blog post about buying an SLR I said just that at the time:
So, what I want is a nice little, rugged waterproof, small compact that I can shove in my pocket or rucksack when I’m out cycling etc and a proper digital SLR so that I can get back into some proper photography
So, time to put the plan into action. I have the SLR, time to buy a compact. So far on my wish list is either a Pentax Optio W60 or an Olympus Mju Tough 8000.
Both look pretty good on paper and the reviews are good too. The Olympus is quite a bit more expensive at £263 and althuogh it has 12MP rather than the 10MP of the Pentax, I’m not at all worried by that. As far as I am concerned the resolution is nowhere near as important as the lens or the light sensitivity. The Pentax wins as far as the zoom is concerned, 5 – 25mm f / 3.5 – 5.5 (28 – 140mm in 35mm film format) compared to the 5.0 – 18.2mm (28 – 102mm equiv. 35mm) of the Olympus. It also wins on light sensitivity (ISO 50 – 6,400 compared to a maximum of 1,600 on the Olympus).
The Olympus does have a slighter larger LCD Screen at 2.7 inches vs 2.5 inches of the Pentax and it’s ruggedness is more impressive which could make it a likely contender. The Olymups is
Shock-proof from heights of up to 2m
Waterproof up to a water pressure equivalent to 10m depth
Crushproof up to 100kg
and Freezeproof up to -10°C
Perfect for life in Wales and for me to carry around (almost) wherever I go.
The Pentax on the other hand is waterproof to a depth of 3 meters, dustproof and coldproof to -10 degrees celcius . Not quite so impressive, but realistically that should be OK for most things I throw at it if I’m fairly careful
The other thing that may clinch it in favour of the Pentax (as well as the price) is the fact that the Pentax takes SDHC cards the same as my SLR (and Anna’s Compact) whereas the Olympus takes xD or MicroSD cards. The Pentax is also slighter lighter, which may matter on those long MTB climbs!
I feel a purchase coming on soon. Has anyone owned any of these cameras? How do you like them? Does anyone have any other recommendations?
I’ve been toying with the idea of a new camera or two for a while now. My existing camera is good, a Panasonic DMC LZ10 but it isn’t quite perfect. When I bought it I was after the best of both world, the easy an portability of a compact and the versatility of an SLR. At the time it was fine, a good zoom lens, plenty of exposure control and settings to play with all in one neat body.
But, it is out of date now and doesn’t have a particualrly high megapixel rating and in some ways it was always a bit of a compormise. The ‘compact’ nature meant that there wasn’t ever quite the level of conrol and sophistication you get from an SLR and to be honest it wasn’t that compact so was still quite a big camera to carry round.
So, what I want is a nice little, rugged waterproof, small compact that I can shove in my pocket or rucksack when i’m out cycling etc and a proper digital SLR so that I can get back into some proper photography. Anna was thinking of buying me the compact as a joint Xmas and birthday present but then I saw what looked like a good deal on a Canon 450D Digital SLR. I got the twin lens kit which comes with the standard 18-55mm Canon lens, a 70-300mm Tamron lens and a 4GB SDHC card. The second lens isn’t a Canon lens but the equivalent package with a canon lens was selling elsewhere for around £700 whereas this package was £540 and then you can get £50 cashback from Canon.
On top of this we got cashback by shopping via r-points and some cashback from our credit card so we actually paid around £480 for it.
Trouble is, it has already arrived, but one fifth of it is my birthday present, another fifth is my Xmas present and the remaining 3 fifths I’ve paid for. I think I’ll manage to convince Anna that I’ve paid for the camera and smaller lens so I can start playing with it now and she has bought the second lens which I’ll get for my birthday / Xmas.
I shall have to think of some photo assignments to go on now.
